As the Internet is becoming more commercially oriented, product and service providers are exploring new ways to promote and sell a wide range of their products and services. Such efforts to date have generally taken the form of a vendor (or vendor company) establishing a website on a machine (computer or server) connected to the Internet.
The websites generally have a product display and purchase functionality integrated therein. A website is, in general terms, a server application running on a computer which accepts connections from client programs. Client programs, such as browsers, allow a remote user to access the information stored on the website. The information can include a broad range of multimedia data including textual, graphical, audio, and animation information. A common client application is in the form of a web browser, which, via mouse, keyboard or command line input, allows a user to access and “navigate” around the website.
Internet-based retail has become extremely popular over the last several years. Both business-to-business and business-to-consumer retail channels have benefited from the advances made in e-commerce technology, enhanced transaction security and improved data bandwidth.
Online retailing can be traced through three generations of commerce-enabling software. Initially, simple HTML forms were utilized by retail websites to facilitate online transactions between users and the proprietor of a website. Users were free to indicate their orders on these HTML forms. However, the forms were generally only suitable for indicating a few items of interest. When more than a few items were indicated, the HTML forms became difficult to manage and inefficient, since the order form was separate (on a different HTML form page) from the item description.
The next generation in online retailing involved “shopping cart” software. An electronic shopping cart is simply a computer software program that operates as an online retail website's catalog and ordering process. Typically, the shopping cart functions as the interface between the website and the user, allowing users to select merchandise, review the merchandise that has been selected, make any modifications or additions to the selected merchandise and purchase the selected merchandise. Shopping cart software is similar to a physical shopping cart, such as that commonly found in a grocery store, in the sense that selected items for purchase may be commonly grouped together in the shopping cart and purchased with a single transaction. In an online environment, a user can select an item of interest for purchase as the user browses through a website and can choose to “place” the selected item in the shopping cart. The software remembers the selected items during the user's browsing and even maintains a running total of the purchase price.
However, while electronic shopping carts are useful and have resulted in increasing the simplicity of online retailing, conventional shopping cart software is limited as an electronic commerce tool. This limitation resulted in the development of the third generation of online retailing software, “storefront” or “store building” software. Websites constructed with this software include conventional shopping cart functionality and also allow the website proprietor to add, delete, or temporarily hide products on the website, change product prices, set up sales and promotions, provide secure transaction features, manipulate graphics, and integrate the online operations with existing physical accounting and inventory systems.
Regardless of the generation of e-commerce software implemented on a website, information about the products and services offered at a particular website is generally maintained in an online database usually resident in the server that maintains the website. The database may contain fields such as product name, SKU (stockkeeping unit, an identification of a particular product that allows it to be tracked for inventory purposes), descriptive text, price, weight (to calculate shipping), and the electronic file name of an item photograph or other identification information of an item.
Since a website is often navigated by more than a single user at any given time, a different shopping cart is associated with each user. For example, a cookie file (small computer file) that contains a user's shopping cart identification information, such as shopping cart number, may be transmitted to the user's own Web browser software resident on the user's computer system and may remain stored on the user's hard drive during the entire visit at the website (and may even remain stored on the user's hard drive after the user leaves the website or terminates an Internet session). Cookies are therefore an efficient tool for maintaining the association between the user and the shopping cart and are implemented by most e-commerce software.
Alternatively, e-commerce software programs may utilize a temporary Internet Protocol (IP) number, that is automatically assigned to a user by the user's ISP (Internet Service Provider) when the user logs onto the Internet, as an identifier to associate a particular shopping cart with a user. Also, a randomly generated shopping cart number may be appended to the URL (Universal Resource Locator) appearing in the “Location” or “Address” field of the user's browser software. In such case, whenever the user navigates to a different product page of the website, the cart number, being appended to the URL, effectively “follows” the consumer through the site.
Regardless of the particular software program utilized, integrated shopping carts are highly desirable electronic commerce software applications. Using an integrated shopping cart allows a user to select items from a number of different websites, collect the items in a single integrated shopping cart and purchase the items with a single transaction. While highly desirable, integrated shopping carts have been difficult to implement.
Therefore, universal shopping carts have typically become popularized. One such universal shopping cart is available from BuyWiz Software. Using BuyWiz's universal shopping cart, users can collect items from various online stores and save the selected items in a single shopping cart that resides on the user's personal computer instead of being integrated with a particular website. The cart's contents can be viewed, either on-line or off-line, and the user can receive sales or price change notifications, and purchase some or all of the items via a single click using a single central registration form.
The BuyWiz shopping cart works in conjunction with a shopping server/service offered by BuyWiz Software. When a user browses a BuyWiz-supported merchant website and arrives at a purchase page of the website, such as a webpage that contains an action for adding an item to the shopping cart, the BuyWiz “shopping bag” automatically appears on the user's display. FIG. 1 is a sample screenshot of the BuyWiz shopping bag 10. Using an input device of the computer, such as initiating a single click of the mouse, the user can select an item to be “placed” in the shopping bag 10 where it appears with all of the other items in the shopping bag 10.
If the selected item is from a merchant that is supported by BuyWiz Software, the user can choose to purchase the item and the BuyWiz server fills in the requisite registration forms with the user's fixed information, such as name and address and credit card information. Once an item is “placed” in the shopping bag, the BuyWiz server continually monitors that item's pricing on the merchant website, posting any price changes directly to the shopping bag display interface. Since BuyWiz's shopping bag is an independent software program that remains resident on a user's computer and the participating websites can support its functionality, the shopping bag is not integrated into the e-commerce functionality of those websites. As such, BuyWiz's shopping bag software incorporates its own e-commerce functionality in order to process product and service orders thereby adding complexity and overhead to the software. In effect, any commercial transactions are handled by the website from which the product or service was selected. Thus, the universal shopping cart does not eliminate the need for e-commerce functionality to be a part of the websites.
Other solutions to providing a universal e-commerce shopping experience have been proposed. One such solution is proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,895,454, that issued Apr. 20, 1999, to Harrington (herein the “'454 patent”). The '454 patent discloses a method of effecting commerce in a networked computer environment. A database of vendor product data and an associated database interface that allows remote access by one or more users is established. A local user interacts with the database by querying the database to specify a local user's product/service specification (a search request to locate a particular product or service of interest). In response to the query, the database provides the local user with a selection of remote vendor network websites. After the local user interactively connects with one or more of the remote vendor network sites, the user selects products/services from the information provided on the remote vendor network website. The selection of a particular product/service triggers a transaction notification which records the user's selection and associated financial transaction data which is transmitted to the database and associated database interface. During, or at the conclusion of, a local user's shopping session, the user confirms the selection(s) whereby the database and associated database interface transmits purchase/order data to the remote vendor sites corresponding to the user's selection.
The '454 patent proposes to establish a “virtual shopping mall” of affiliated member vendor websites so that a user can peruse the various products and services offered from the vendors at a single location. For example, affiliated member vendor websites may establish an electronic list (including images and textual description, etc.) of products/services offered for purchase and provide the electronic list to a database administrator so that a product/service database can be maintained including the products/services indicated in the electronic list from the vendor websites. A user can search the database to locate desired items and select desired items from a website for purchase. Accordingly, each product/service selected from a particular vendor website can only be purchased through that first website using the e-commerce functionality of that first website. Other products and services from other vendor websites cannot be purchased through the first website. In order to purchase a different product or service from another vendor website, the user must access that second vendor website and purchase the item through the second website, using the e-commerce functionality of the second website.
Thus, while the '454 patent provides an efficient “window shopping” aspect to e-commerce, it does not address the inefficiencies resulting from causing a user to conduct multiple purchases at different websites instead of allowing the user to select from multiple vendor items and aggregate the selected items into a single integrated shopping cart so that the selected items can be purchased in a single transaction.
Unfortunately, electronic shopping carts have been predominantly localized to distinct websites. They have not been implemented to function across different websites. As such, electronic commerce is stifled, because the user cannot commonly gather all of the desired products and services across any website in an integrated shopping cart and purchase all of the selected items with a single transaction. Instead users are generally forced to conduct separate transactions at each website, each having their own electronic shopping cart in which users can “place” and purchase selected items from that website. It is desirable, then, to provide an integrated shopping cart that can be implemented across any website. It is to this end that the present invention is directed.